‘A landless Indian’ discovers a sense of home and identity

Chris La Tray’s personal and historical memoir “Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home” showcases the power of storytelling and the responsibility that comes with carrying not only one’s own story, but also those of a culture and a people in a moment of rediscovery. The author seamlessly knits his life from the hazy connections to his family’s Chippewa heritage, to his official enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians with attentive research and knowledge gathered from Indigenous intellectuals, elders, artists, activists, and historians.

Mr. La Tray bluntly depicts the devastating effects of colonialism that stretch across generations. At the same time, his love for home, place, and people, along with his humor and the wisdom gleaned after years of meditating on identity and belonging, rings true on the page. Mr. La Tray recently spoke about his journey back to being, in his words, “a proud Indian.”  The interview has been edited and condensed.  

You grew up in western Montana, and your family still lives in the Clark Fork Valley. How did writing this book expand your sense of home? 

The extent of the kinship networks across all the tribes of the Northern Plains has been revelatory to me. We fought each other, certainly, but we also traded and intermarried and shared territory in ways that settler historians tend to overlook. I love knowing that any time I sit down with an Indigenous relative from this region, I’m a few degrees or so removed from a shared ancestor. I love knowing that the blood and sweat of my people are all over the valley I live in near Missoula, north to south and east to west for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

I love knowing I am descended from the mightiest buffalo hunters of the plains, and that I am only a couple generations removed from people who did so for subsistence purposes. I can squint and see them just beyond the horizon, and that is powerful stuff, especially as buffalo begin to slowly make their return. As they rise, we rise. That corising is a beautiful looming view on another horizon that we are moving steadily toward, and I love that, too.

The Little Shell Tribe is referred to as the “Landless Indians of Montana” throughout the book. Can you expand on that distinction and how that moniker is related to the tribe’s federal recognition in 2019?

It’s complicated! Little Shell was the hereditary chief of the Pembina/Turtle Mountain Chippewa, who wouldn’t play ball with the feds and was therefore banned from negotiations related to what we now know as the McCumber Commission of 1892 and its diabolical Ten Cent Treaty [the tribe was paid 10 cents an acre for about 10 million acres of ceded land in 1905]. Little Shell and his followers became a diaspora of people whose names were literally struck from tribal membership rolls as a result of this federal chicanery related to land theft. The ancestors of this diaspora of people, forced to the fringes of communities all across the northern reaches of the Mountain West, became the Little Shell Tribe after 120-plus years of effort to restore our status in the eyes of the U.S. government. But we knew who we were all along, and our dedication to proving so will become legendary.

The extensive research required to write this book shines through, and you do a fantastic job synthesizing your inquiry to meld with the chapters of personal introspection. Can you, as a creative writer, talk about what it was like to marry these two different styles of writing?

It was a challenging two-draft process. I originally approached it like one might a series of linked magazine articles, as that was the only way I could get my brain around the entire project. For us magazine writers and journalists though, putting ourselves in our stories is usually a big no-no, so it came as no surprise [that] after I turned my first draft in and started mentally designing my bespoke leather-and-fur tuxedo for the National Book Awards, my editor came back and said it was great but the book needed more of “me” in it. That was my Homer Simpson “D’oh!” moment. 

There was the challenge then, digging into my personal relationship to all of this and deciding what to share and what not to, and threading it through the narrative in a way that hopefully feels natural to the reader. That was much more difficult than I anticipated, but the result is definitely a better book. 

How does your story, and the still-unfolding story of the Little Shell Tribe, resist the ever-present influences of colonialism and provide a path forward?

Claiming Indigenous identity in 2024 is in itself a powerful act of resistance. Think about it: The Indigenous people of Turtle Island took the best blow the most powerful country in history could deliver right on the chin, and now we are standing up and dusting ourselves off. 

We aren’t supposed to be here! I love knowing that the spirits of anti-Indian imperialists like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt are turning somersaults in their graves knowing they failed in their efforts toward eliminating us. 

So here we are, ready to lead the way in making this land a healthy place to live with again, and more and more people are looking to us for ways to do so. Colonialism and imperialism are still brutal, active realities all over the world, but I believe their days are numbered.